If so, do you think they cycled the machines? Those games must have led a hard life...to be played by kids and adults who were rough on the cabinets etc.. But I am wondering if any video arcades were open round the clock. I reckon the games would only operate a year or 2 before the CRTs got weak from constant use if so..
I remember a few cases where old arcades were run til the games were totally burnt up...Games from the likes of Midway and Sega in the 90s...a lot of those developed poor focus or a tinted grayscale but were still in use.

Cool. I am interested in this stuff...Do you guys think that some of these games used special tubes, perhaps ruggedized cathodes for longevity, or vibration-resistant? I know some mil-spec tubes were made, for raster-graphics color monitors, but what about the gaming sector? I mean, before the crash of '83, the video arcade industry was a HUGE money maker..

24 times 365 + 8760 hours...I am SURE any decent CRT could outlast that long. At least the ones made "in the day" of the arcade games. I would say at least 25K hours or so... Maybe not the modern chineese junk though.

I did, many were on all day, and all night..... Never saw a bad tube, the ones I worked on
I always turned the brightness down...... And vector screens always looked like new....
Actually there was only 1 with a weak tube, it was a table game, and it was really old...
I don't even remember what it was, and I only saw one of them....

The ones that looked like they had bad focus most likely was just dirt. I use to open them
up and clean the screens and the plastic and it was almost twice as bright when I was done.
retouch the focus control and it was good for another 500,000 hours.

I had one screen where I had to replace a driver chip in one because it had poor contrast.

The company I worked for after a game got really played out they would get a new board
graphics, replace the control panel, and out it would go again..... same old screen....

Besides the hand controls and coin mechanism, most problems were power supply, and for
that, unless it was a top of the line company like Sega, Atari, or Midway, it was just a little
$50. box that for the most part we just replaced as a unit. Top companies had real power supplies
with a giant transformer, no switching power supplies.

I think all that stuff was designed to be on all the time.... New they sold for $5K so no games
with reliability....

No, the CRTs were not special, industrial-grade ones. In the monitors I first worked on in 1981, many games (from Williams, Stern, Taito, and Bally/Midway at least) had a monitor chassis that was a customized version of a regular JVC color TV set, with a 19VJTP22 CRT.

Plenty of CRTs, even color ones, can operate 24 hours per day for years. I have some at my work place (a large airport) that still look bright and clear, and I installed them in late 1999 and have never turned them off except for occasional servicing or power shutdowns. As Username1 mentioned, I made sure to set them to moderate brightness and contrast.

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Chris

Quote from another forum: "(Antique TV collecting) always seemed to me to be a fringe hobby that only weirdos did."

I can see how a CRT would last a lot longer being used in a " vector" format.

Think about it. Over 90% of the screen...and therefore cathode..goes UNUSED at any given time. SO wear would be seriously decreased . Sure "burn " would be a real problem-- ( and WAS--even 30 or so years ago on games I played like centipede, ) even more so than a normal raster display which has a "background" glow, and is always lit to some degree. But the cathodes and phospor as a whole would seem to last a LOT longer. I doubt many games had the tubes replaced for burns unless it got to be so bad they were not useable.

In FACT..I would hazard to say...that LCD panels would last LESS time in a vector display than a CRT , given the BL has to be on ALL the time--other than modulated BL ones--(and I doubt any arcade games use them).. and so they would wear out quicker that way. Not too mention...there would be a bit of "glow through" on ANY LCD used in a vector display from said BL..

I don't think there can be such a thing as a vector-based LCD. LCD panels themselves are directly addressed pixel by pixel. Perhaps a vector-input circuit could be made that converts to pixel addressing, the way analog raster-scan-type input circuits are used on LCDs now.

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Chris

Quote from another forum: "(Antique TV collecting) always seemed to me to be a fringe hobby that only weirdos did."

The vector games had not a great range to the brightness, turn them up just a little
and the lets call the reposition lines would begin to show..... So you could not turn
them up to the point of damaging the screens.... The only bad thing was that when
they were on, stuff like top score, and game title were displayed in the same spot,
the teaser stuff. But I never saw a vector game with a weak, or damaged screen...

And you are right, the guns were on only while painting the lines on the screen..... Bright
as you want, still on only .001% of the time of a scan line set for their entire life....

I own two arcade machines.. Both are Mortal Kombat 2 and Ultimate 3.. I bought them back in the 1990s for 1k each.. I also had a few 80s machines.. Teenage Mutant Nija Turtles, and Double Dragon and Shinobi.. All three of those sadly were in my garage at the time that had bars for windows with no glass pains, so the climate killed the machines and I ended up having to take them to the road when we had to move out.. I called a friend and told them to get the machines or they are going to be in the land fill..

What I've noticed with arcade machines especially from the 1980s, is alot of phosphor burn in the TV monitors.. Usually it was "Insert Coin" or the name of the game that was constantly flashing on the screen when the game was not being played...

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Looking for an all tube or hybrid color TV set from the late 1960s, early 1970s that's in a steal cabinet..